Birch, Alexandra. “‘They were drinking, singing, and shooting’: Singing and the Holocaust in the USSR”

In this article musicologist Alexandra Birch analyses the weaponization of music as a tool for racial othering, psychological terror and dehumanization of the Jewish victims during the close range mass shootings in Nazi occupied territories from the former USSR, focusing on the use of forced music by the Einsatzgruppen – the Nazi paramilitary “mobile killing squads” (Birch, 172). 

Birch’s analysis adopts a Voice Studies perspective to examine musical violence within a “wider traumatic soundscape” (173) as a key mechanism for the separation of collective identities between victims and perpetrators – maximizing the psychological toll from the killings for the former, while minimizing it for the latter. In acknowledging that forced singing has been utilized as a tool for torment in different contexts of political violence, such as Pinochet’s Chile, Stalin’s Gulag and Kim’s North Korean camps, Birch showcases the potential of applying a Voice Studies lens to analyse the perpetrators’ psychological conditioning of normalizing violence during mass shootings in a variety of contexts.

The article draws on distinct examples of musical violence in former USSR countries such as Belarus and Ukraine, relayed in bystanders’ and survivors’ testimonies collected by the research organization Yahad in Unum, as well as records from the Soviet Extraordinary Commission. The testimonies recall instances where victims were forced to sing while digging graves, as well as during or following mass executions, producing the musical accompaniment to their own torture and death. Birch traces the distinct musical realities that forced singing produced for perpetrators, bystanders and victims, emphasising the disintegration of the individual voice’s agency in its merge with the collective. In the musical collective, individuals are conceived of in relation to their “sonic group” , eliding the lone voice’s characteristics and facilitating the perpetrators’ further empathic distancing and disregard of the victims’ individual humanity and suffering. 

Birch’s analysis zooms in on the victims’ collectivised reduction to the stereotype of the “Musical Jew” via mechanisms of musical othering. The article explores the musical undernotes of the Jewish population’s collective stereotypical representations, reproduced for centuries and perpetuating a negative association between Jewish identity and music. The stereotype’s practical application during the mass shootings was reflected in the physical enactment of the “Musical Jew” trope through the practices of forced singing, amounting to a powerful device for collective dehumanization, separation and humiliation. In this way, Birch traces music’s repurposing during the Holocaust as an axis where radical differentiation between the stereotypical conceptions of Jewish subalternity and the contrasting Nazi self-projected image of erudition was reproduced, sustained and weaponized for genocidal means. 

Birch’s article contributes to the scholarly fields of perpetrator and Holocaust studies, tracing the traumatizing aspect of music’s place in the structure of the Holocaust. The article nuances our understanding of the function of singing in violence-driven contexts, complicating its status as a manifestation of the human spirit’s transcendence of and resistance to violence, by re-examining its parallel function as a tool which facilitated and amplified the dimensions of the tortuous reality of the Holocaust genocide.

Author of this entry: Bilyana Manolova

Birch, Alexandra. “‘They were drinking, singing, and shooting’: Singing and the Holocaust in the USSR”. Journal of Perpetrator Research, vol. 4, no. 1, 2021, pp. 171-191